Half a century after getting shot down over Vietnam, where he would be a prisoner of war for more than five years, John McCain shared images of his painful past Wednesday with an unlikely visitor.

Vietnam's Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong, the party's first general secretary to visit the United States, was accorded a high-profile Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

A day later he made a low-key trip to Capitol Hill to see the lawmaker who perhaps more than any other has guided the rapprochement between Washington and its former foe.

McCain, 78, held closed-door talks with Trong -- Vietnam's most powerful policymaker -- in the meeting room of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which McCain chairs.

But the former Republican presidential nominee, who alternates between gruff administration critic and avuncular statesman, could not help pulling Trong, whom he met recently in Hanoi, into his personal office for an extraordinary trip down memory lane.

"That was Truc Bach, part of the West Lake," McCain said, tugging gently on Trong's elbow as he showed him photographs of the Hanoi landmark where a Vietnamese mob pulled a wounded McCain from the water on October 26, 1967.

Trong nodded in recognition of the familiar scene, where a statue of McCain now stands.

"That's the peace signing on the (USS) Missouri, in the war with the Japanese. My grandfather is standing in front," McCain said, referring to John S. McCain Sr, a commanding US admiral during World War II.

He also pointed out a photograph of his father, who commanded US Navy operations in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.